leesalogic your rattie earrings are packaged, sealed, and ready to go early tomorrow morning!

I've more lil' rats, and I will relist them as soon as these guys ship.

/begin random complaint about the mail: Two weeks ago it was $3.50 on the dot to ship a padded envelope. Come to find out yesterday when I printed the pre-paid stamp for this order it's jumped to five..

The shipping costs as much as almost all of my earrings. I'm lost. Do I hike prices of earrings to make up for that? Do I hike shipping? Do I not do anything because at least I am making a bit of spare change at this and hiking either will see me losing any buyers?

Other than that surprise, today was a good day. We had a massive bbq and invited grandma and had an impromptu family get together.

I made a set of mario boo earrings, but the sculpey glaze bubbled so badly and warped the red paint to orange. Live and learn I guess.

I am seriously considered trying a polyurethane clear coat.

I need to get my hands still on a bottle of TLS but Micheals doesn't sell any. TLS is a great way to make liquids, glazes and other food stuffs which I'd like to make more of.

Anyway, verra sleepy nao and it is the bedding of the fat lady time.

Good night.

Also, very sorry for not being around lately! :3 Ryzom and ANIME has occupied me in between the cleaning and the laundry!

( BUTT TON MORE CELL PHONE PICS THIS WAY )

1. Love notes sent now via cell phone to Shawn.
2. Last weeks supply for making Lolsagna (lasagna)
3. Our sexy Saturn. God I love the color!
4. Raven, our cat.
5. The ferrets at the pet store.
6. Ferrets at the pet store.
7. Chinchilla.
8. A tiny cemetery in the middle of a lawn right before a gas station.
9. I F'N' LOVE COLORIN'
10. A view of our Star Bucks from far away.
11. Star bucks drive through!
12. Star bucks green tea latte. Shawn says it's his truest vice.
13. The new Vivanno which I ordered which is the most delicious filling thing evar.

We used to shop at Walmart when Shawn worked as manager for a call center. His hours were from 4 pm until 12:30 am. He was usually in the door at 1am, and while it was super odd hours—it was when we had super, when we watched shows we’d recorded earlier. We had our ‘evenings,’ when most of the world was dead asleep or just getting up to start their day.

When he got his job working at a bank, all of that changed. He had to be up to be able to get to work at 8:30am and home about 6:30pm. It almost goes without saying that these past ten months have been quite an adjustment. Shawn’s doing well, honestly, it’s me that’s still having issues.

I miss a few things about staying up late. That’s the chance to catch a lot of my online friends from all over the world who seem to be able sign on just when I should be going to bed, catching television shows that I might not see during the day, (no, not porn. I AM connected to the internet, after all.) and the sort of quiet that the night brings without the harsh glare of day.

But I don’t miss the shopping at Walmart.

We’ve been shopping during the day at Publix. Sure, it’s a franchise, but it’s presented as a small time grocery store, and I have never had an issue with Publix. The people that work there have often gone above and beyond what I expect in grocery stores—then again, I was used to shopping at Walmart.

Walmart sucks every little iota of happiness out of my very being. From the moment I get out of the car and struggle through the parking lot filled with women yelling at their spouses into cell phones, to fighting to get into the door behind the slow-assed family busy thinking the world’s going to slow down for them—I begin to fill with hate and dread.

We went to Walmart tonight because Sunday is Shawn’s day off and we needed groceries. A mistake that will haunt me for several moons. Gaining entrance into the bloated consumer paradise called Walmart was much as I described it above. As we crossed the threshold from sanity to the realm of insane, the harsh, florescent lights blinding me—I was immediately bombarded by the noise of the checkouts. (All of them full and right by the doors of course.) The Walmart greeter was a young sloe-eyed man that watched us enter with all the enthusiasm I imagine a roach would watch our feet pass by his dark little domain. When I offered him a hesitant smile, all I got in return was a quirk of the brow and a half-smirk that seemed to mock me for, oh, I dunno, being amicable.

We quickly grabbed a cart and went on our way as I was beginning to sense foreboding already. Shawn wandered off toward the deli to get sandwich meats for his lunch this week, and I took the cart to go pick up the rest of the groceries. (Deli’s are notoriously slow where we are, I can usually get our shopping done by the time they’ve cut our meat and cheese.)

As I was wondering about, there were several differences between Walmart and shopping at Publix that stood out for me. All the people in the Walmart store simply looked…deflated. Everywhere I peeked about there was hard beady little eyes and tense, shut tight mouths. A mother fed up with her child tearing a scarf from it’s hands and balling it up angrily into her purse—a gaggle of children running past me, screaming about candy and a very tired, pregnant mother listlessly telling them to stop knowing that they wouldn’t listen to her anyway. In the poultry aisle, a husband and wife spent the entire time arguing over the fact that he said told her he liked thigh meat, and well, she’d obviously over heard incorrectly.

Wheeling my cart down the canned foods to grab some canned mexi-corn to add to my special burrito mix—there was an old man dully standing by himself near the beans. He had watery eyes and thick glasses and for some reason I wanted to place a wife beside him, but she wasn’t there, obviously.

People walked fast and did their best not to meet me eye to eye, while in Publix, I’ve been known to make an offhand comment to Shawn and actually get someone to respond to it—or make a joke and have people laugh. Down these aisles, I feel like if I would I’d just get stared at or mothers would pull their children from me.

The floors were filthy here and there. There was a particularly interesting splatter stain in the coffee aisle when I went to pick up the no-name chocolate creamer for my coffee. It looked like a spill of some sort that, instead of being cleaned up, was left to congeal. And then several customers just kept running over it with feet or cart, with no one caring.

Things on shelves looked as if they had exploded or a pack of rabid humans had gone by to fuck everything up and leave in that cartoon ball-of-dust-and-arms-and-legs fashion. Everyone I encountered wearing the obvious blue vest or shirt looked weary, heavy-lidded and simply devoid of any human pleasantry what-so-ever.

And I remembered that this is pretty much how it’s always been. That it hadn’t changed.

It made Publix shine in comparison. There’s a manager that works at Public that knows Shawn by name. We went in one day for a few pieces of papaya. What we were confronted with was the whole thing, and it was pretty damn large; we would have wasted it. Just as we were going to put it down one of the girls that was working produce must have overhead us, because she offered to take the whole papaya and cut a few slices of it for us. We were so impressed, really, that we wrote up something positive for her and gave it to the manager.

He’s never forgotten Shawn’s name since then.

The aisles are always spotless, the floor has never been messy, there’s never a messy shelf or exploded produce that looked like a riot for carrots had come and gone. When Shawn goes in to pick up things without me, they ask him where I am. When we go together, the service is always awesome, even the people shopping there seem brighter, more colorful and certainly far more pleasant.

Don’t get me wrong. As middle to low class as we are, we love Walmart for offering us cheap, we really do. We know they’re selling their soul to the devil to do it, and we’re grateful to be able to go to stores like it to get nice things at affordable prices, but god damn, the environment in which they’re doing it in makes me want to forgo the chance at cheap just to save my sanity.

I think I’d rather stick to shopping at Publix and pay that extra cent or two on my toothpaste than brave the horde at Walmart anymore than once or twice a year or during extreme emergencies from now on.

I stumbled upon this post by TeeGee Studio who found the idea from anodyne design.

Now, I'm no great artist. I am neither amazing with the pencils or la-tee-da with the prints. However, the first THREE people to comment to this post with their name and an e-mail to which I can contact them to get their address--will in the sometime near future end up with either a sketch, maybe some cookies or a print of one of the many photos I have taken.

THE CATCH IS/RULES ARE--you MUST do the same in your own journal. You must post this Meme and offer to hand make something for the first three people to comment in your blog. If you don't, you don't get anything, sorry :p.

There are probably many medical and family history reasons as to why I am fat, or at least, some science magazine would probably tell me so.

I think it is because I enjoy food far too much. I enjoy the taste of food so much that I can't deny myself simple things.

Take for instance, today. I had toast for breakfast and I could have used our healthy alternative olive oil based margarine, but there was the tub of whipped, unsalted butter sitting next to it. It called to me, a siren's sweet melody of buttery deliciousness that promised a creamy, rich taste that normal butter or margarine just cannot reproduce.

It didn't take me long, I crumbled and smoothed that beautiful butter alllll over my bread.

I love food, I love the taste of good food, I love to cook food, I love to eat food. Food isn't an obsession, I adore food.

I'm tired of feeling guilty because of it. I'm tired of reading about people finding it disgusting overweight people eat in public. I'm tired of the jokes about fat people getting there because they're lazy. I'm not lazy, thank you, I have a love for food and that makes me fat. I walk, I garden, I clean, I cook, and I'm still fat. This shouldn't make me a target for calling the integrity of who I am as a human being, into question.

I'm really tired of hating myself for loving something so important to us as human beings. I'm tired of being self conscious because people feel it necessary to point out my flaws, and I'm realllllllllly tired of stores not carrying anything larger than a size zero. There are more sizes out there, bigger AND smaller. Women do not come in single-super-model shape and men do not all come in golden muscle-boy.

So, fuck it. I'm going to continue trying to live healthier. If my love handles and torpedo tits remain, than whatever. At least *I* know I am trying and that I'm a human being underneath a roll or two.

And I'm not picking on you skinnies, either. Some people are born bean poles, some of us are born pears. If it's your natural body shape, then so be it. I won't pester you to "go eat a sandwich," as long as you don't fucking glare at me when I eat my god damn sandwich as if you've just caught me nibbling on four week old kittens.

Also, I've got to go take care of Kim's dogs tonight and into Tuesday night. I am so not fucking looking forward to three huskies, being covered in dog hair and DIAL UP INTERNETS.

Several disjointed thoughts I have, such as why is it when everyone else has gone to bed and the house has gone still, I can HEAR silence? It's very odd because there really is no other sound like no-sound. That hissing, static drone of--nothing.

My birthday is coming up on July 2nd, and Shawn's father's birthday was yesterday. Because everyone had to/has to work/Shawn's mother getting laid off/the realization of the cost of caring for a diabetic without insurance/ I will be cooking his (our) birthday supper Sunday.

Today, I will pre-cook the meat loaf and the macaroni and cheese with four kinds of cheese because I don't want to have the hassle of cooking for eight people on Sunday.

This way, all I have to do on Sunday is prepare the red 'taters for their bake in rosemary, olive oil and garlic.

Shawn says he'll take me to Tai-Tai on July fourth, but I don't want to go, for a number of selfish and non selfish reasons.

We can't afford it.
We can't afford it.
Fuck it, I'm getting old and birthday's fucking suck fuckity fuck fuck it.
I want to stay home and sulk this year.


Maybe that's half the reason I've been in such a desperation to create something recently.

I will be twenty nine years old this July, 2nd, one year away from the big 3.0, where horrific tales of hairy chins, larger moles, willy nilly birthmarks, deepening voices and night sweats with day chills begin to circulate.

I have a love/hate affair with aging. I cannot wait for the grey or white hair and I cannot wait for my laugh lines to deepen but I don't want the pile of negative shit which starts and I certainly don't need an extra reminder that I am hurtling happily through life toward a permanent dirt nap to which my consciousness will dissipate and my brain will no doubt become a delicious side course for zombies. Or worms. Whichever.

Maybe I'm just not looking forward to my boobs drooping any further, because if these puppies are pummeled by gravity anymore, by the time I hit 50 I'm not going to have torpedo tits, I'm going to have foot warmers.

I baked cookies last night to be desert to today's shrimp/rice/portobello/salmon/asparagus grill day. The recipe is called ( My Big, Fat Chocolate Chip cookies. )I think it's the best recipe for 'chip cookies I've made yet.

Shawn tells me when I cook something well and I taste them for the first time I do this little butt wriggle, side to side weight shift dance as I'm standing in the middle of pots, pans, mixing bowls and the kitchen taste testing. He then labels whatever I'm eating, "Happy __(Insert food here.)"

It's from when I made my orange cup cakes with cream cheese orange frosting and they were so good that I did my little dance when I ate them -- which started him doing the little dance while eating them, which started a horrible chain reaction of me calling them happy cakes, or happy cuppy cakes, which then further immortalized anything pastry-ish or sweet I make as "happy (insert food here.)"

So this is where the Happy Cup Cake Dance came from, and why the cookies were renamed to Happy Chocolate Chip cookies, and perhaps why people think I'm weird.

It's okay, I'll bake them a cookie and send them some happy.

( Naan Bread )is really good with roasted red pepper humus (hummus?). Earlier this morning I dug in the garden, found China but no end to the pine roots yet. After that I made flan and Naan. I AM POET.

I took pictures! COME! DANCE WITH ME IN MY BEYOOOOTEAFULLLL GARDEN OF ROOTS!





AWESOME. A PILE OF DIRT AND ROOTS!

Chicken/Turkey Meat balls

1 pound of ground Turkey or Chicken
1 slice of bread pulsed into crumbs
1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese + more for garnish
1/2 cup of finely chopped or grated onion
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
2 tablespoons of parsely
2 tablespoons of thyme
1 egg
Salt and Pepper

Preheat by turning broiler on. Spray baking pan with favorite nonstick spray (I actually rubbed on olive oil because I didn't have any spray). Combine ingredients in large bowl, forming meat into 2-2 1/2 inch balls and place on sheet. Broil for ten minutes.


Simple, very, very simple but they turned out scrumtulecent.